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But inside there are flutes of champagne and animated Gallic conversation, as a largely expatriate audience awaits the arrival on stage of the singer Vanessa Paradis.

To the French she is a national icon in her own right - child star turned chic chanteuse; Chanel model; award-winning actress - but to the English-speaking world, she tends to be more famous as Mrs Johnny Depp.

Not that Vanessa Paradis is married; she is the mother of Depp's two children (11-year-old Lily Rose and Jack, who is eight), and her wedding finger bears a large diamond ring that he gave her, but in an American television interview at the end of last year he observed, with some grace, that a marriage certificate might detract from his partner's identity. 'I'd be so scared of ruining her last name. She's got such a good last name - Paradis. It doesn't get better than that.'

Seeing her on stage in London, it's hard not to agree. At 38, Vanessa Chantal Paradis is a force to be reckoned with, her presence far greater than her breathy little-girl voice might at first suggest.

Her live version of
Joe le Taxi
, the song that made her famous a quarter of a century ago, is almost unrecognisable from the version that she sang at 14; its original cute pop tinkle replaced by a bluesy sultriness.

She's gorgeous-looking, of course - men and women alike in the audience, whatever their sexual orientation, are smitten as Paradis undulates across the stage - but as a performer she is unselfish, introducing each of her band by name, and swift to share the limelight with them.

'Oh, God, she's perfect,' murmurs the model Laura Bailey, who is watching from the Chanel box, next to the equally admiring editors of
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. 'Do you think she ever wakes up with a hangover and shouts at her children? I don't.'

Still, despite the apparent intimacy - for she has an uncanny ability to make it seem as if she is singing on a one-to-one basis - Paradis is also deft at maintaining her distance off-stage.

She and Depp are famously guarded about their private life, keeping their family out of the public domain with such success that they have remained relatively untroubled by the intense scrutiny that bedevils other celebrity couples (which may also explain why their relationship has not been branded a tabloid double-act, in the manner of 'Brangelina' or 'TomKat', nor a drama played out over pages of newsprint, unlike Depp's previous romance with Kate Moss).

That her adolescence unfolded in public may have something to do with her adult reserve; although she is too gentle to give the impression of froideur. At Chanel, a brand that she has advertised for two decades, Paradis is admired for her good manners, as well as her beauty.

'Vanessa is not one to stamp her feet hysterically,' observes Karl Lagerfeld; while Paradis herself says, 'I am, like most people, polite and pleasant with others when they are so with me.'

Over the years I've happened to see her at several Chanel fashion shows and parties - singing in Shanghai at a launch in China, in December 2009; front row at the cruise collection in St-Tropez last May - and her persona has always appeared at one with the image portrayed in the advertising campaigns (variously for scent, lipstick, handbags): alluring, quirky, individual, yet the essence of Parisian style.

'The key thing about Vanessa is not what she does but how she does it,' says Lagerfeld. 'She could make singing the telephone directory beautiful.' It's an image that remained intact at last month's couture show in Paris, and in Coco Chanel's private apartment afterwards, where Paradis was invited along with other favoured guests, models and muses (Kirsten Dunst, Anna Mouglalis, Amanda Harlech, Kristen McMenamy).

Paradis was in a daytime version of her on-stage outfit at Koko: vintage skinny jeans, black boots, Chanel jacket, and a simple white Isabel Marant T-shirt rather than the beaded couture top she wore in London. But it's not the clothes you notice first upon meeting her, nor the famous gap between her front teeth - though the latter contributes to her characteristic sibilance. Rather, it's her eyes, big blue pools with an unwavering gaze.

She is happy to talk about music, about how a song 'is a moment in time', yet also a means of reaching into the past. 'When I see someone's head go back like this' - and she stretches out, sinuous, her slender body so supple that her long honey-coloured hair reaches almost to the floor - 'while they're listening to a song, then I know it's taking them 10 years back, as well. The songs from your childhood, when you hear them you get chills all over.'

As a child, growing up as the daughter of interior designers in Val-de-Marne, a southern suburb of Paris, Paradis listened to 'movie sound tracks - I used to learn them by heart, and sing along to MGM musicals.

The very first one was
Singin' in the Rain
.' You can catch a glimpse of the little girl she once was courtesy of YouTube, on a video that shows her first appearance on a television show, in which the eight-year-old Vanessa performs a song from a popular French musical (
Chanson d'Emilie
).

he is a blonde cherub, oscillating between confidence and uncertainty; at one point the camera pans to her parents in the audience, and her father reminds her to smile. Her subsequent precocious career might, in the normal scheme of things, have ended badly (think of other troubled child stars, from Lena Zavaroni to Lindsay Lohan). But somehow Paradis negotiated the transition from Lolita nymphet to womanhood; although for Karl Lagerfeld she remains the embodiment of 'completely natural youth'.

She is swift to emphasise the positive - both in her conversation and on stage the words 'lucky' and 'thank you' are repeated like a mantra - and her account of her debut as a pubescent starlet is served sunny-side-up. 'I was 14 [when
Joe le Taxi
was released], and I was like a child, really a child, and it seemed like a gift to me - I loved it.'

The song was at the top of the French charts for 11 weeks, and a number-one hit in 25 other countries; followed in 1990 by an album composed by the singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (whom she still cites as an inspiration) and a César award for Most Promising Actress, for her role in
Noce blanche
as a teenager who has an affair with her middle-aged philosophy teacher.

At the time, Gainsbourg compared Paradis to one of his previous protégées, Brigitte Bardot; not only for her sex-appeal, but also for the ambivalence and hostility engendered by the 17-year-old girl. 'She has that in common with Brigitte,' said Gainsbourg, interviewed by
Rolling Stone
in 1990 (the year before his death). 'With such a seductive aura to her, she has females hating her. They are petrified with fear that she'll steal their guy!'

The hatred manifested itself in literal ways - on abusive graffiti scrawled outside her house, with insults on the street and in the press. At the time, she already spoke with an air of resignation about the downside to her celebrity. 'I understand those who don't like me,' she told
Rolling Stone
. 'You don't have a private life anymore, when you decide to be well known. You belong to the public and you don't have the right to feel sorry.'

Nowadays she accentuates the safeguards that were provided by her family: 'I was very lucky. My mum was there all the time, and I was very protected. If you have the support of people with a heart and a brain, then you're good.' But in retrospect, the risks seem as great as the opportunities.

In 2005 Jean-Claude Brisseau, the director of
Noce blanche
, was arrested, fined and given a suspended prison sentence for sexually harassing actresses. Paradis has never commented on this, although the evidence at Brisseau's trial included a statement by Vanessa's mother that the director had made an improper suggestion to her daughter during the filming of
Noce blanche
.

No wonder that Paradis is now so wary of invasive intrusion, watchful against any threat to blur the line between her publicity and the intimacies of her private life. She does admit to concerns at the thought of her own daughter becoming a performer, though sidesteps a comment on Willow Smith (the terrifyingly self-possessed superstar daughter of Will and Jada Smith).

'It's not my style to judge anybody,' she says, when I refer on the rapidity of Miss Smith's global ascent. 'Everyone has their own way, and there's no way I could judge anyone that I don't know. It's very difficult. My parents trusted me, and let me do it.'

The bar to further discussion is reinforced as she continues, the politeness in her voice even more pronounced. 'First of all I don't know if this is something I should be discussing with you, but I think this is something that we should take into consideration together. I would rather that my daughter waits, and that she learns how to do it, before she does it - whether it's singing or acting. I would love her to become at ease with the art first.'

The quiet charm of her speaking voice belies her guardedness; which may be why Paradis leaves a friendly impression, albeit an elusive one. She refuses to fit into the cartoon shorthand of celebrity reporting - neither victim nor man-eater - and nor will she accede to a simplified version of her evolution from manipulated girl-child to liberated woman.

Mention her first advertisement for Chanel in 1991 - as a bird in a gilded cage, contained within Coco's own private salon - and Paradis resists any suggestion that the gold bars were emblematic. 'I was 18 years old! It was amazing! I learnt trapeze skills for a week, and it was the first time I ever got a manicure in my life!'

So, no complaints whatsoever from Vanessa Paradis; a self-possession that certainly meets with Karl Lagerfeld's approval. 'I like people who don't depend on others, who have their own lives. Hers is particularly successful; she never burdens you with her problems.' If her life does seem perfect from the outside - flitting between homes in Paris, the south of France, Hollywood, and a private Caribbean island - then it has not always been so.

But herein lies her appeal; the balance between fragility and strength that she declares to be essential: 'It's not good to live by extremes.' As with her relationship with Johnny Depp, she makes it look easy from the outside - the glamorous bohemian couple who seem somehow to have achieved stability - but doubtless the inside is rather more complicated.

Love, she observes, 'is something natural that needs to be worked at a little bit all the same'. As a formula, however reductive, it might very well be applied to Vanessa Paradis herself.